leave your troubles behind you and just keep going
by no white horse for me
Summary: James has left his best friends behind him in Minnesota. When a pissed and angry Camille rocks up at his door almost breathing fire, will she be able to point out his mistakes before it's too late? No romance, purely friendship


"James?" Camille shouted, slamming her fist on the door to apartment 2J. There was no answer, so the pretty brunette with the fiery temper continued to hammer on the door until it slid open and a man wearing a fancy black suit and with a shock of white hair peered out.

"May I help you?" He asked in a posh English accent, but Camille just ignored him and pushed the door open with so much force that it slammed against the wall. "Do come in." The man muttered, but she ignored him again.

"Where is he?" Camille demanded, a fire in her eyes that would have scared Voldemort. The dude held up a hand and went up the steps. Camille looked around at the apartment that used to be oh so familiar but was now oh so different. It was off-white and exactly where Camille was looking was a huge portrait of James. And off to her left where the kitchen used to be was a serving window, lay out with platters of sushi.

"Excuse miss, Mr Diamond is currently busy. It may be better for you to return at some other time." Camille looked up to see the weird man standing at the top of the stairs with a look as if something disgusting was under his nose. Camille crossed her arms over her chest, glared at him for a moment, and then shouted:

"JAMES DIAMOND, YOU GET YOUR BUTT DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW BEFORE I COME UP THERE AND STRANGLE YOU WITH YOUR OWN HAIR!" The dude flinched, and there was a heavy thud above Camille, which told the method actress that it had shocked the heartthrob. A door was flung open and suddenly James was standing at the top of the stairs, rubbing the top of his head with a sore expression.

"Hey Camille." He said, leaning against the hand rest that wound its way down the staircase. When she looked up at him, he almost slid down the stairs – the fire in her eyes was enough to scare a wrestler and it sure as hell scared James.

"Get down here." She said quietly – James was reminded of Mrs Weasley from Harry Potter, with the temper of a bomb. It was just a slow build-up before BOOM. She exploded. When he didn't move, just gripped tighter onto the banister, Camille shrieked in a high-pitched voice, "GET DOWN HERE, NOW, JAMES DIAMOND!" it sent him flying down toward her. He stopped right before he bowled her over, and braced himself for what was coming. He waited with bated breath for the stinging of her palm hitting his cheek, but it never came.

When he peeled an eye open hesitantly, he saw Camille standing before him, staring up at him with wide, disbelieving eyes. "What?" He asked almost calmly, but there was a tremor to his voice, one that she picked up on easily but ignored just the same.

She surveyed him for a moment and then spoke so softly it was like the wind. "You're not happy." James scoffed at the words and went over to the leather couch that replaced the bright orange and sat down.

"Sure I am. I've got everything I could possibly want," he began to tick them off on his fingers, "Money, fame, a great place to stay, Sebastian" – Camille took him as the guy with the hair standing in the corner – "All the sushi I can eat, and all I have to do is clap my hands and I get food. I'm living the dream." But Camille saw the flicker of sadness in his brown orbs, and her fingernails dug into her skin.

"But you don't have friends." She said quietly, and James turned to her.

"Who needs friends?"

"Everybody."

"Not me."

The thermometer broke.

"Bullshit, James!" Camille shrieked, and James jumped so violently he slid off the couch and onto the floor with a thump. "Of course you need friends! And you need those boys, desperately! You need Kendall to keep you balanced. You need Carlos to make you laugh and to do all that crazy crap you boys do. And you need Logan because…" She paused and wiped at her eyes. "Everybody needs Logan. But you need him most." She ran a hand through her hair messily and looked at him with imploring eyes.

"What happened to you, James?" Her voice had dropped to a whisper, and she reminded James heartbreakingly of a child. "What happened to _my_ James Diamond? Because _this_," She waved a hand around the drastically different 2J, "Isn't the James I remember. And Jo and I want him back."

"Maybe I'm better this way." James said with a shrug, and Camille's lip curled back in a snarl. And then, almost out of nowhere, she marched over to the full-length picture of him and drove her foot through it without a blink. James screamed and leapt to his feet, looking over at Sebastian, but the old man just stood there with a 'this girl is real' look on his face.

"What, you don't like this?" Camille taunted, kicking the picture again and again and again until it fell off the wall to the floor with a crash. She stepped right onto his face and the ripping of canvas rang in James's ears.

"Camille, stop! Stop, please!" He pleaded, desperately trying to grab her hand, but she pulled away quickly, slapped him hard across the cheek with a resounded _thwack_ and marched right over to his real Van Gogh painting that he bought only because it reminded him of Logan, who spent hours on eBay when they were little just trying to buy a fake one. She surveyed it for a minute – he was sure she was admiring it – but then she grabbed his hockey stick off the wall, stood back, and with an evil grin at James, she hit the Van Gogh with the stick.

James screamed so loud his ears rung. And still Sebastian did nothing. "Camille, that was real!" The pretty boy shouted.

"I don't care!" She screamed back, and her voice cracked. James flinched as though he had been slapped, but immediately screamed again. Camille had swung the hockey stick at his crystal lamp, which shattered on the ground.

"That's enough!" James shouted, ripping the stick from her hands and tossing it aside. He grabbed Camille's skinny wrists and met her eyes with a dark glare. "What's the matter with you?" He demanded, looking at the ruined remains of his apartment.

Camille scoffed and pulled her wrists from his tight grip. "Ditto, James, ditto." She walked around him toward the stairs and leapt up them three at a time.

"Where are you going?" He called, but she just flipped him off and walked along the corridor that led to his bedroom. He followed after her, muttering darkly. He followed her down the brightly lit hallway covered in mirrors to his room, which was flung open. And his heart sped up a little bit because she wasn't supposed to go in there. It was _his _room, and no girl – unless invited – was allowed in! When he leant against the door of his room, he found Camille in front of his bureau, looking down at the picture frame that stood on it.

"You're not the only one who misses them." The brunette whispered suddenly, reaching out a pale, trembling hand to pick up the hand-carved photo frame. "And I know you miss them. This Hawk guy, he's ruining you." She turned to him, still hugging the picture close to her chest, and James saw tears glistening in her dark brown orbs. "And they miss you too."

"They're the ones who told me to give up!" James snapped suddenly, and the tears dried immediately from Camille's eyes.

"They told you to move on!" She snarled, and James flinched.

"And I have!"

"Bullshit! Absolute bullshit! To move on means to get over something! You're so caught up in being famous that you've forgotten what life is about! You don't have any friends, James!" She advanced on him, and although the pretty boy was scared, he didn't move back. "You're only one piece of a whole without the others. Don't you care that you guys were best friends forever? Don't you care that you guys grew up together? Don't you care that without those other boys, you are _nothing?_" She drawled out the last word, waving the photo in his face, letting the tears roll freely down her cheeks.

James stared at her with his mouth hanging open and a look of hurt evident on his face. But a little voice inside him was whispering, 'she's right and you know it'. "I am James Diamond." The teenage heartbreaker said quietly. "I'm good enough to be famous on my own. I don't need them to be famous. Hawk'll help me." Camille stared at him as though seeing him in a completely different light – a bad one.

"Or destroy you." Camille whispered.

"He's great." James told her.

"He's a lying, filthy cheater who wants to get to you because of Gustavo!"

"He'll help make my dreams come true!"

"You don't have dreams, James! You used to, and now you're just a puppet on a string being controlled by your master!"

"I am not a puppet!" James shrieked, with a look of wild driven anger that scared the pretty brunette, but she didn't back down.

"You are to him, Diamond!" She had never used his last name, but _damn_ did it feel good to let it roll off her tongue!

"You know what?" James asked, giving her a funny look as if he were insane. "I think you're just jealous because you haven't gotten a role in the time you've been here!" Camille reeled back as though slapped and James immediately knew it was crossing a line. There were tears forming in the young girl's eyes, and James said softly, "Camille…" reached out a hand to grab her arm, but she pulled back and skirted around him so she was standing in the doorway, the light filtering in around her petite frame that gave James the impression of an angel.

"You sick, self-centred bastard." She said softly, her voice tear-strained and broken, but James was sure that it wasn't only because of what he had said, but because she was still holding the picture. "Don't you see what he's doing to you? Or are you just that blind to this obsession that you don't see what you're missing?" James stepped toward her, but Camille stepped back, the tears glistening on her cheeks.

"This isn't the James Diamond I remember. This isn't the brother and best friend I remember. And this new one?" She pointed at his silk bathrobe with a blue 'J' on the right side in calligraphy, and it made James feel tacky. "This isn't the one anybody wants.

"So, until you can find out who you really are, and not become someone's pet, like you are now, I don't want to talk to you. Jo and I miss our big brother. We missed all of you when you were in Minnesota, and we were really happy to have you back. We miss our big brothers. But we want the real versions of you, not these acts that you put on. So," She held out the picture frame with one hand and wiped at her tears. "Until you become the brother that I remember, know and love, I don't want to talk to you, see you, hear you, or any of the above, and neither does Jo." And with those final, parting words, she dropped the picture frame to the floor with a resounding crack and fled the entire apartment, but not before James caught a strangled sob.

The picture frame was lying, shattered, on the floor in front of James, and he dropped in front of it, gathering the pieces up in his palm, ignoring the way the glass cut into his delicate skin. And when he looked at the picture frame with a photo of all four boys grinning with their arms around each other's shoulders, his own tears built up in his throat because there was a huge crack in the top right hand corner.

Right where his face was.

And as he looked at his three best friends, his own tears began to fall, landing on the cracked and broken photo frame, because his mind was whispering to him 'everyone's so much better without you. Everyone's so much better without you.' And that little voice was right, because Camille had just proven it to him.

'But no, that's not right.' Another voice – that sounded suspiciously like Logan's – reasoned. 'That's not right because Camille wanted to prove to you that this isn't the boy she remembers. She still loves you, she just loves the old you.' The tears were falling freely onto the picture, and without really thinking, James hurled the frame at the wall and watched with some satisfaction as it shattered to the ground in a million pieces.

There, he thought to himself, now there's nothing to distract me from my work.

But when his three best friends turned up at his door telling him the band was back together, it took all of self-control not to shred up his contract with Hawk and say yes immediately. But when they left, and when Hawk and Rebecca left, Camille slid into the apartment, walked up to his bedroom, and held him while he cried. He wrapped his arms around her skinny waist and let her sing softly into his hair, and he couldn't help but think that she had a beautiful voice.

"This is the James Diamond I remember." She whispered as he was dozing into sleep. "This is the James Diamond I want back." She pressed a kiss against his temple and slid away from him. Just before she shut the door, she turned back to him, and, although she knew he couldn't hear her, she whispered a single phrase before she disappeared.

"The one who loves his friends."

**Morale of the story? An angry Camille is a bad idea! So this is set during Big Time Concert when James returns to LA without the boys to sign with Hawk. in case you hadn't figured that out...so, please, leave your reviews and chiz!  
>HPloveofmylife<strong>


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